One thing certain about Mark Gevisser biography of the incumbent president of Republic of South Africa, The Dream Deferred: Thabo Mbeki, is that it was well timed. It came out just at the time when the governing party of South Africa, ANC (African National Congress), went to it 52nd National Conference to elect its next president after Mbeki.
After more than a seven year immersion in relevant archives and travels on two continents (Africa and Europe) Gevisser’s biography is thoroughly researched, referencing, amateurish psychoanalytic, and none too innovative. From the beginning Gevissers tells us ‘This book demonstrates that if Mbeki has been driven by one overarching dream, it is that of self-determination—personal, political and psychological.’ Then he let’s that slips for Lanston Hughes’ poem as thesis and, sometimes, forced reference point.
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
Like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore –
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over –
Like a syrup sweet?
Maybe it just sags
Like a heavy load.
Or does it explodes?
Mbeki first publicly mentioned the poem in introducing ‘debate on reconciliation and nation-building in 1998.’ All things considered this should have worked well had Gevisser been more of a storyteller than a journalist, all be it a well read and competent one. Indeed the strong point of Gevisser’s book is the broadness by which he tells the story of the ANC, especially in exile, than anything else. The book is also a mine for post apartheid South African politics even if one gets the feeling Gevisser didn’t invest enough attention into South African early history, especially implications of Frontier and Colonial implications. That section sounds more like parachute journalism with dull and glum recycled notions of Xhosa, especially Mfengu, character makings.
Givisser is more into his element when talking about Mbeki’s political experience; in the end, not too shabby for a political biography. But Thabo Mbeki: The Dream Deferred lacks the ruthlessness necessary to streamline Mbeki’s life into a functional narrative. There are vast stretches of prohibitive dryness and repetitive material that could surely been excised to bring down the 801 paged book into, at the least, half that. (I think there should be a law against writing books that are more than 500 hundred pages; no subject is that interesting).
Gevisser’s tone is that of investigative journalism, with literary nuggets there and there. It lacks informal anecdotes and titbits that make for entertaining read in lives of politicians. Though there are instances that beg for the raw venting of feelings and deeper delving into greasy facts (like reports of the president’s womanizing tendencies) the biographer chooses only suggestive implications, giving us too much muscle without fat. In fact Gavisser’s analysis of incidences around Mbeki’s life is most of the time flattering to the president with the notable exception of Aids dissidence case.
Gevisser, who was educated at Yale, concedes that the beginnings of the book were in his profile writings for a Sunday newspapers, coupled with inspiration he got from ‘Hermione Lee’s exceptional life of Virginia Woolf’. After that he immersed himself on intricate turns of Thabo Mbeki’s life, especially sources material instead of just printed material, hence his deep familiarity with his subject. The idea of a biography, he wrote to Mbeki when canvassing the book idea, was ‘a thesis, really, about biography as a tool for transformation.’ Mbeki bitted. Though Gevisser’s biography is competent in other ways, one can’t help judging it by higher standards of books like, Nicholl's The Lodger: Shakespeare, which introduced a far interesting paradigm shift on telling of familiar stories. Instead of telling a cradle to grave story, recent biographies concentrate on a certain episode that almost defines the life of its subject with web-like strands pinned into it like a pin centre. I was hopeful, after reading the book’s insightful introduction about what happened between Mbeki and Zuma, this might be the case with Gevisser’s book. For a moment I thought Gevisser was going to tell the story backward from the dissection of that incidence. Instead he chose Lanston Hughes poems, which to him expresses Thabo Mbeki’s lifetime dream and fears since he came to power.
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Thabo Mvunyelwa Mbeki was born in 18 June 1942 (try finding that crucial information from the biography) at a little village called Mbewuleni. The village is in a small town of Idutywa in the former Bantustan of Transkie. His father, Govan Mbeki, was a prominent member of SACP and one of Rivonia treason trialist, with the likes of Nelson Mandela. Epainette Mbeki was left to provide for the family when Govan went to jail. Thabo had one elder sister, and two younger brothers, Moketsi and Jama (a lawyer who died under mysterious conditions connected to heat squad in Lesotho). It is obvious that Gevisser tells the story of Thabo through the eyes of Epainette, his mother most of the time, who is an obvious first and constant contact for the biographer.
Thabo was educated at Lovedale College, the first fountains of education for black people in the Southern Africa with missionary origins. He was involved in politics and was expelled from the institution. He went to Johannesburg where, through his father’s contacts he met (white) people who organised a scholarship for him to study economic at Sussex University, England. He graduated with Masters in Economics from Sussex and went for a soft military training in the Lenin Military Institution at Moscow. He married Zanele Dlamini whom he met in England through political connections with the Tambos. He worked as a de facto assistant and understudy of O.R. Tambo, the then president of ANC. Though based in Lusaka, Zambia, travelled the globe a lot doing underground ANC work.
Gevisser credits Thabo for being the voice of reason, against the popular but doomed military voice within Umkhonto Wesizwe (ANC’s military wing). At one time Thabo was suspected of being an informer (something very common among the comrades in those confused times). He was lucky to escape torture like many comrades who were suspected of being informers, thanks, most probably, to his close relation with Tambo. Thabo was also often accused of living a soft life as a de facto ANC foreign minister while the likes of Chris Hani were popular for their valour in the military frontiers. Gevisser intimates that this had a bad psychological effect in Thabo’s psyche before the years the ANC was unbanned in South Africa.
According to Gevisser, Thabo initiated talks with South African delegates, first with business people before the actual apartheid politicians. This was a very unpopular move within the ANC, and Gevisser says Tambo actually used Thabo to take the flack for it while he stood to reap the successes. The most difficult years for Mbeki, according to Gevisser, was when Thabo lost the lead of negotiating status to Cyril Ramaphosa, the upstart lawyer with no ANC pedigree within the ANC (Ramaphosa came through the United Democratic Movement that kept the fire of liberation struggle burning during the years when the ANC was in exile wilderness.) This, for Mbeki, were first sign of ‘a dream deferred’; he felt used and discarded. Gevisser suggests that his not so warm relation with Mandela began at this time. Mandela, who had serious political differences with Thabo’s father, Govan, initially was not keen in regarding Thabo as his successor, but was pressured into the position by the ANC leadership. Thus Thabo became the first deputy president of democratic South Africa, and four years later, its president, serving two terms (ten years) that end next year (2009).
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In truth thare’s nothing much new in all this to those who have followed Mbeki’s life with a modicum of interest. What Gevisser did is to collect material into one source, which is no mean task on its own; in fact I dare say this is a defining book concerning the political life of Thabo Mbeki. What is regrettable is that the traits of Mbeki the man do not come through very clearly; in fact you’re sometimes at pains to find simple biographical facts like his birthday mentioned on the book. He makes much about Mbeki’s ‘disconnection’ from the general mass and lack of integration. ‘From a very young age, his response to this condition of disconnection had been to sublimate all emotions,’ writes Gevisser, ‘all relationships, all desires, into the struggle for liberation. He had long made a political career—unusual indeed for a freedom fighter—around pragmatism, but at his core he was a revolutionary idealist.’
Gevisser tries to go into depth about the unconscious distrustfulness and fear of white people against Thabo Mbeki but left this reader dissatisfied. In any case the real question about South Africa now is whether the country can go beyond politics of cultural difference or grievance and popular cynicism. The tendency so far has been for everyone to hope for winning anyone into their own point view so as to establish the hegemony of their political values. It stands to be seen which side compromise would come or be subverted. Jacabo Zuma is less rigid with his values, rather lack of, and so has become the favourite of everyone in the manner of a girl who puts out being a favourite of boys in High School.
As I’ve already indicated; Thabo Mbeki: The Dream Deffered reads more like an extended newsaper feature than, say, a scholarly analysis. What jars most about it is psycho bubble and lunk of metaphors, well suited for platitudinous theorising, but a little cloying for a 801 paged book. Another thing I noticed about the book is that it kept promising that soone or later a putsh of some sort would happen, that you’d rich its nadir, but for some reason you never get the satisfaction of doing so. More like make love without reaching orgasim, or a thud sneeze. But in this age when memoirs of aggrievement climb into a crowded genre of no literature ability in political writing this is a better book.
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